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Comment by fencepost | Hacker News Reader

We had a fully integrated HL7 iphone app which could interact with OpenVista, and other systems like Vocera and Philips and Siemens systems.

So you were attempting to provide charting capabilities on the first generation iPhone? Honestly even now with larger screens, etc I can't imagine that working well on anything smaller than a tablet, and HL7 would only be a selling point to potential partners or investors - 90+% of potential end users wouldn't have a clue about it. You might as well say "our app supports JSON and EDI!"

In 2007 that would have been a dancing bear - amazing to see, but not because of how well it dances.

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eh,

WEll - we had an ESB appliance which would tie into the various HL7 capable systems such that we could integrate for certain services, and provide interfaces/applications which turned an ipod touch into a quick duty/assignment/nurse-call/alert/control device.

Basically the intention was initially to integrate the ipod touch as effective a remote to the hospital.

Tie in with RTLS, assignments, results, orders...

So, yeah - it worked pretty well. Had support from nurses and doctors, but it was too early...

We were told by too many people it was too expensive and too small and nobody would want to interact on the phone.

We knew the ipad was coming... but failed to convince people.

About two years afterward, the iPad came out - we had already folded and released what did open source to OpenVista, and then Dr. Chrono was able to get traction where we couldnt.

(We were only two founders, no funding.)

Could you elaborate on Siemens wanting to steal it?

They had told us that they wanted to integrate with us - then they expressed interest in buying us and had us come in for several meetings with their tech staff so they could ostensibly perform some due diligence - and had us go through our arch and demo for them and explain the vision and the features we had - claiming that they'd be forthcoming with an offer... then ghosted us after and it became clear they were then trying to create their own system based on our archtecture and what we shared with them.

Recall that scene from (was it silicon valley) where they did the whole thing on the whiteboard at the VC - where they stole the idea from there... yeah that happened to us.

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